CHAPTER XVIII.

ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Leslie stopped for luncheon at an odd French restaurant, the Fontainebleau. It was a Gallic triumph in soft grays and rated as being more Parisian than any other restaurant in New York. After luncheon she ordered the driver of the taxicab she was using to take her for a spin on Riverside Drive.

“Keep on going out Riverside till I tell you to turn around,” she ordered the man. “If you hear me tell you to go slow, then go slow. I’m interested in certain properties out on the Drive.”

Even by prosaic daylight Leslie felt a strange new sentiment for New York which had never before visited her. What a wonderful life she might have in the splendid city of her birth if only she were her father’s assistant. Perhaps she might be, and before another year had passed. If she could successfully carry out at Hamilton the project which was now occupying her thoughts he would be forced to admire her for her audacity and brilliancy. How he would laugh at a certain feature of her undertaking. Not unless she were clever enough “to get away with it.” That was a foregone conclusion.

Leslie’s swarthy features stiffened with stubborn determination. This time there was to be no failure. Her small dark eyes were engaged in keeping a concentrated watch on the residences lining the Drive as the taxicab slipped easily along on the smooth paving.

It would be a great day for her when her father forgave her and took her back into his confidence. Before she devoted herself wholly to a career in finance under her father’s generalship she would make him take her for a long cruise to the South Seas in his superb, clean-lined yacht, the _White Swallow_. So Leslie promised herself as the car sped on.

Presently she had come within pleasantly familiar territory. Since earliest childhood she had seen the palaces she was now passing. In them lived families she had known and associated with as neighbors. She had played with the girls and boys of these vast, cheerless castles. They had all had the same dancing masters; had attended one another’s parties. They had later formed the younger set with whom she had moved socially. Like herself many of them lived only to please themselves.

There it was; her old home! It was the house in which she had been born; the house from which her mother had passed to Heaven, leaving behind a baby girl to be brought up by nurses and governesses and surfeited with riches out of all healthy proportion.

Leslie snatched the speaking tube from its accustomed place and called through it to the driver. “Slow down,” she ordered, “but keep on going.” She had spied the house from a distance of half a block away. In consequence the driver had begun to slacken speed before the machine had passed the “show shop,” as Leslie had whimsically named her home because of its ornate splendor of architecture and breadth of rare-shrubbed lawn.

“Go ahead and park,” she again ordered through the speaking tube. “Any place along here will do.” The instant he had obeyed her and brought the machine to a stop she hopped out of it and quickly gained the sidewalk. The Cairns’s residence took up a half of one block. Another massive gray stone residence claimed the remaining half of the same block.

“Thank fortune,” she muttered as she strolled along at the slow swagger she affected. “There’s no place like home, Leslie, old top. Peter the Great can lead a merry life at the show shop, but _I_ should fidget, for all _he_ cares,” was her bitter reflection. “Rather that than see the place boarded up like a disused barn. Gee whiz! Then I would have my troubles. Wonder how much of the menagerie is at large inside?”

Leslie paraded up and down the entire block several times. From the street she could see nothing about the exterior of the house to challenge her interest. An ornamental iron fence squared the Cairns’s property. The entrance gates were closed, apparently locked. She stopped before them during one of her patrols and pretended to lean against them. As she did so she investigated them. They were securely fastened.

She stood eyeing them with sullen dismay, her forehead corrugated by a deep scowl. Of a sudden she appeared to have laid hold of a forgotten fact. Her brows cleared like magic. Thanks to a crafty provision against such an emergency in time past she could cope with this latest obstacle.

She lingered at the gates as long as she thought prudent, her avid glance roving from point to point of the house, searching for signs of the servants about the place. She smiled grimly to herself as she recalled how often in her childhood days bright-eyed groups of “common kids” would pause on the sidewalk outside to peer wistfully through the iron interstices of the fence at the spring glory of crocuses, hyacinths and tulips which graced the Cairns’s garden beds in colorful, fragrant loveliness. How contemptuous she had been of the famished little beauty worshippers! Now she was “on the outside, looking in.” She was “on the wrong side of the fence.” She was “barred out” of the show shop as effectively as had been “those common kids.”